Whatever happened to protest songs? A few years ago people were protesting a song, the Star Spangled Banner, but nobody does political protest songs anymore. There used to be tons.
Protest music, especially anti-war, has always been dangerous for the performer cuz it opposes the armed authority and often the public will as well. Patriotic nationalist songs far prevail.
Yankee Doodle Dandy was a British army song ridiculing at the Yankees who adopted it in proud defiance but in ironic humor. On the day the Confederacy surrendered Abraham Lincoln requested that Dixie be played on the White House lawn cuz “it was fairly won” in the war. He was making a joke.
White abolitionist singing groups were the rock-stars of the mid-1800s; when almost all mainstream music was religious. The Hutchinson Family from Milford NH, near my home, were perhaps the most popular musicians in the USA in the 1840s. The song John Brown’s Body (adapted from Battle Hymn of the Republic) was a Christian tribute to his anti-slavery martyrdom/execution. Powerful stuff indeed considering Brown was a vicious sociopath Jihadist who made a point of murdering people using swords.
It’s hard to say where the civil rights and war protest songs of the 1960s, or anytime before, would land in 2021 with social media censorship community standards.
I wrote a protest song and it was immediately removed by YouTube and I was punished. So I’m writing a book to accompany my many protest songs and if you’d like to support me in that please check out my song and writing and donate. Thanks https://gogetfunding.com/were-all-niggers-on-wall-street/
